CAUSE - Heinz College Speaker Series October 7

5000 Forbes Avenue,Pittsburgh PA 15213

07 October, 2022

Description

R. Drew Smith, “Situating Faith Communities in the Struggle for Reparations” Professor of Urban Ministry and Senior Research Fellow of the Metro-Urban Institute, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Yale University. Author: From Every Mountainside: Black Churches and the Terrain of Civil Rights and co-author Racialized Health, Covid19, Religious Responses. The presentation will examine reparations advocacy by a vanguard of African American clergy proponents, from Bishop Henry McNeil Turner’s late-19thcentury demands for federal payments toward emigrationism and Black Atlantic linkages, to 21stcentury black clergy involvements in national level, local level, and sector specific reparations policy activism. Attention will be paid to evolving theoretical and operational framings of this reparations advocacy and to variances in levels of American religious and political receptivity to reparations proposals. Prospects for Pittsburgh-area reparations pursuits, including current Hill District initiatives, will be viewed against these broader historical and contextual trajectories of American public and black religious responsiveness to reparations concerns.